A smart choice of a vacation rental script will be inclusive of features like:
Reservation Module: The front-end should contain a neat and organized calendar with a reservation form. Bookings should be managed by property owners or web admins.
Responsive Design: The layout of your property rental script should adapt to any end-user device and screen size to render optimal operation.
Content Management: You should be able to manage all aspects of vacation property listings, including extras, features, images, seasonal prices, Google maps and owner or host details.
SEO Support: You should get all basic tools to optimize your property rental software for search engines: URLs, Meta and Alt tag admin controls.
Property listings: Although you’re the owner of the portal your hosts are the one that will keep your script running. And not all the hosts are familiar with coding so every simple detail required for a listing should be clear in a form style. Your hosts should be able to review all received bookings and guests’ contact details seamlessly.
Multi-language Support: This vacation rental software allows you to handle multiple translations of both the vacation rental control panel and front-end.
Payment Integration: Guest should be allowed to pay online using PayPal and Authorize.Net. Or by using any of the internet’s most secure payment gateway system your country approves. It becomes your service providers responsibility to help your product integrate with other payment gateways without hurting your budget.
Intuitive admin system: The vacation rental script should provide an intuitive and user-friendly control panel with user-level access, integrated unit reservation, real estate classifieds management, translation module and many other customizing options for you. Also, the product you’re going to go for should be flexible enough for customization in many ways, from layout design to SMS and email notifications. Everything!
Periodic updates: Every app you’ll be investing for will have to undergo periodical updates or version updates to make it more reliable and scalable. If you’ve bought a vacation rental script that is that not flexible then you’ve done a very bad job. So be precise and consider every version update documents and other support materials with your open source script provider before investing.
Learn about using Google Spreadsheets or Excel to compare different service providers in the online clone script marketplace.
Email & SMS notifications: Your open source Airbnb clone should help you send in-app email notifications and SMS reminders to the guests and to hosts to inform them for reservations, interests made, new listings or payment received.
Bug-free code: Purchasing a feature rich property rental script that is overrun with bugs doesn’t look genius. That is the reason I recommend you to go for tools like Codacy for testing your codes reliability.
Customer support: Your final decision before investing in the best property rental script will come around the clock through email, chatting or even telephonic assistance. If your script provider is going to ideally sell you the script and go all incognito, he is not your partner.
I have seen many customers bagging up with phone calls and crying all over the table explaining how hard it became for them to overcome a poor supporting service provider. So I suggest you to again go through the maintenance and customer assistance guidelines before making any choice. No matter how established your service provider’s business is.
SMS-notifications: Users can receive messages to notify them about their booking and also promotional offers.
Supplementary: While making an open source Airbnb clone, more social media channels and payment methods can be integrated with it.
Hosts App
Registration: The Host can fill in their details and register themselves by listing their vacant property.
Log-in and Sign-up: The hosts are supposed to log in with their pre-registered ids or create a new account by filling their details like name, number, address etc. They can also sign in via their email address or social media channels.
Manage Personal page and profile information: Edit, manage and update personal profile information like email id, mobile number, address, etc. The account password can also be changed.
Listings Manager: The listings i.e. the property details like the amenities available and pricing can be handled under this section. New pictures can be uploaded whenever required. Booking Listing All the upcoming bookings can be seen in a systematic way, in the form of a calendar view. Each date of the month will showcase the bookings.
Request: This is a passage for accepting or declining the user’s request for your space.
Instant messaging: Hosts can freely communicate with their guests through the chat feature. They can revert to all the queries of the guests even before booking or confirming their stay. Create and send new requests to guests.
Rate and review guests: Each guest can be rated and reviewed according to their behaviour and conduct.
Account: This helps in adding or removing information in the account.
Help: Guest can view the FAQs sections and ask for help in case of any confusion with the listing of their property or in case of seeking any booking or guest related help.
Sharing: Hosts can invite friends to through social media accounts to download the app.
Booking History: All the previous bookings and the payments received can be tracked down here. Also, the revenue generated can be estimated.
Admin Panel Features
Dashboard: The admin dashboard to view all the users registered(new and old), hosts(new and old) and the photographers.
Manage new listing: All the new listing uploaded are scrutinized and processed further. The admin panel provides the liberty to edit, add or delete listings, according to the need.
Booking History: All the previous and new bookings can be checked here. There’s also an update on the current status of each reservation. These can also be edited, updated or deleted.
Feedback and complaints: All the feedbacks provided by the guest and hosts can be viewed here. Any complaints with regard to the hosts or guests can be processed here.
Insights: All the details of the previous and current activities can be observed here. These detailed insights help in future decisions.
Multi-Language Support: The complete dynamic content of the website could be altered or translated into the language required by the business owner.
Payment gateway: To enable even and impeccable payments, the payment gateway has been shifted from Paypal to Stripe in the recent update.
Admin Moderator: A brand new feature in Airfinch which allows the site admin to assign roles to the sub-admins and make privileges to access the website to perform certain tasks.
Feature Listings: One kind of a revenue feature which can benefit the business owners by marking the host listing as featured listing by receiving a small fee.
High performance related features to examine are:
- Backup option
- Senior admin or owner control pane
- App submissions to the App store for both Android and iOS
- Rates & price management
- The speed of the script
- Optional: Developer license